Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's

by John Elder Robison

I couldn’t imagine a better life. I could almost forget my screwed-up family back home. I wished I could stay on the road forever.

KISS had just started using a brand-new technology—Shaffer Vega wireless radio systems—to send the signals from the guitars to the amplifiers. For a band like KISS, who moved around a lot, wireless was great because it meant there were no cords to trip over or yank out. It made my job harder, though, because it meant those huge lights Ace had found would have to run from batteries.

When my creations came to life, I felt exhilarated. I loved to see and hear them run in a live performance. People would stare in amazement and roar with applause and cheers at the things I dreamed up. At times like that, it was fun being a misfit. When I looked around me, the creative people in the music scene all seemed to be misfits, so I blended right in. The only normal people were the managers, and I didn’t deal too much with them. I liked the people in the bands, and they actually seemed to like me.

KISS was one of the biggest bands in the world, and I was really proud that they had chosen me to make the guitar. I wondered what would happen next. Would I become famous? Would I get more work?

That night, I closed the door of my room and went to work on my latest guitar modifications. Alone. I was on my way to being a special-effects wizard for KISS. But that was in their world. When I went home, I stepped back into my own world, a much more ordinary place. The crowds, the noise, the stage—they were gone as if they had never existed. In fact, that’s exactly what some people in the tiny town of Amherst thought—that I must have made them up.

I don’t know if it’s an Aspergian trait, or if it’s just me, but I was never affected by celebrity. No matter how famous a musician was, he was just a guy with a broken guitar or an idea for a sound effect to me. But I could never explain that simple reality to other people. “You’re just modest,” people said when they felt nice. “What an arrogant jerk you are,” they said when they felt nasty.

There were no cell phones in those days, so calling home was harder than it is today. Motels had phones, but that was a real racket, with some sleazy innkeepers charging a dollar a minute for long distance.

I picked him up in a Cadillac. I rented Cadillacs whenever I could, despite the business manager’s whining about the expense. Varmint and I both liked them. They were always brand-new and they had a distinctive smell. Also, our grandmother had driven them when we were little, so we felt right at home.

Many people with Asperger’s have an affinity for machines. Sometimes I think I can relate better to a good machine than any kind of person.

The longer the lights stay off, the edgier the crowd gets. The only lights you can see are the exit signs and the work lights where you’re standing. You’re vulnerable. If they riot, you know they’ll go for you first. You think about that while you wait.

Darkness. Your worst nightmare in the middle of a show. Darkness is when they riot, and you must never, never let that happen. You must develop a sixth sense for your system, to feel how it’s doing, to be really great.

You feel a chill as the lights change in response to your commands. You’ve brought a million watts of lighting to life by leaning forward and moving two fingers. Just a gentle push and you’ve moved enough power to light a whole neighborhood.

It’s just like playing a huge musical instrument, and your hands never stop moving on the dimmers.

The fire chief holds up his sound pressure meter and frowns and waves it in front of the road manager. It’s too loud to talk. It shows 124 decibels, about the level of jets taking off at the Detroit airport. It’s too loud to be legal, but no one hears the chief. The crowd roars and the music gets even louder.

These are machines that run at 100 percent, every show. One million watts of power, right there under your finger. There’s nothing like it in the world.

There is nothing more useless than an unloaded gun in a motel room.

After all, dead people were a fact of life in Florida hotel rooms. Gunshots weren’t, at least not in Lakeland.

A few songs later, Ace picked it up and stood facing away from the audience as he turned it on. The whole stage was dark. Everyone could see something flashing behind him, but no one knew what it was. He lit into the opening chords of “New York Groove,” then turned around and the audience roared.

Did any of the girls try to pick me up? I’ll never know. My sensitivity to other people’s actions was limited enough that any attempt to pick me up went unnoticed. I often felt lonely when I saw couples together, but I could not see any way I could change my own situation, so I just plodded along.

I never felt the desire to pack in all the beer I could drink or all the coke I could snort. I just did not like how it made me feel.

I had not screwed up. I was saving his sorry ass. I was going as fast as I could.

The letter arrived in the mail two days later. It began: “Milton Bradley’s electronics division is pleased to offer you the position of Staff Engineer in our Advanced R&D Group. Your starting salary will be $25,000 per year.”

The next level down was another VP, an ex-marine we called the Juice. He’d been given the name by Bob and Brad, two of my fellow engineers, and it stuck. He said, “What you freaks need is some military discipline!” That pretty much spelled out his attitude toward me and the other engineers.

I wasn’t very good at reading people’s expressions, but I knew people smiled when they were happy. Well, he couldn’t be happy all the time. I wasn’t happy all the time. I wasn’t even happy most of the time. I certainly didn’t smile all the time. Why did he?

We didn’t have any coke dealers or hookers in the parking lot, and it was always safe to walk to your car when work was done.

Until then, I thought people who had been born to these upscale white-collar jobs must be inherently superior to a high school dropout like me. But I was wrong.

The girlfriend’s having an affair. Why tell me? Do I know her? Do I know the guy? Is this a convoluted way of suggesting that I should have an affair, since I have a motorcycle?

It’s clear to me that regular people have conversational capabilities far beyond mine, and their responses often have nothing at all to do with logic. I suspect normal people are hardwired to develop the ability to read social cues in a way that I am not.

When they don’t get the response they expect, they become indignant. If I offer no response at all, they become indignant at that. So there is no way for me to win. Given that line of reasoning, why talk to people at all? Well, many autistic people don’t, possibly for that very reason.

How normal people know which of these questions to ask is a mystery to me. Do they have better memory than me, or is it just luck? It must be social conditioning, something that I am completely lacking.

I am tongue-tied when approaching people unless they speak to me first. If I do speak up, I often say something that’s taken as rude or surprising—especially when I’ve told people something true that they don’t want to hear.

With me, though, there is no external sign that I am conversationally handicapped. So folks hear some conversational misstep and say, “What an arrogant jerk!”

Some nights, we worked till midnight as we raced to get the latest electronic gadget ready for production. And in this line of work, there was no need for any special skill making small talk. We were geeks before the age of personal computers. We were there to create new things and solve problems, not impress anyone with our suave social skills.

“That’s just like the dynamic brakes on a locomotive,” I said. I loved it. Who would ever guess that the same principles that held a freight train back on steep hills would stop the Dark Tower?

Not long after I started, we came out with the first handheld video game with changeable cartridges. They called it Microvision.

That was the definition of management—getting others to do your work for you. And we were the others.

Bob had also worked on another of the company’s products, Big Trak. Big Trak was a programmable tank that crawled around on the floor and made noises. We in engineering were always seeking to expand our lowly tank’s horizons.

I was hard at work on Milton, the next electronic marvel, and Bob was back to Super Simon. Milton was to be the world’s first talking electronic game.

The trouble was, the higher I advanced in the corporate world, the more I had to rely on my people skills and the less my technical skills and creativity mattered. For someone like me, that was a formula for disaster.

Unfortunately, there was no going back. Things had gone bad at Milton Bradley Electronics shortly after I left. The company wrote off a $30 million investment in computer games, and Bob and most of my friends lost their jobs. A short while later, the company was sold.

I knew what I needed to do. I needed to stop forcing myself to fit into something I could never be a part of. A big company. A group. A team.

And by the way, years later, in 1998, I was admitted to the country club. But I had no need for it by then. I wasn’t a part of management anymore. And I couldn’t play golf.

I believe there is a continuum from autism to Asperger’s to normal.

And in the middle you have people like me—some more functional, some less. We can focus our minds inward, and we also have some ability to relate to people and the outside world.

I don’t think I’m a savant, just a highly intelligent Aspergian.

When I read Daniel Tammet’s book, Born on a Blue Day, I was amazed by the similarities between thought processes he describes and my own thinking.

Later, there were periods where my ability to turn toward other people and the world increased by leaps and bounds. At those times, my intense powers of focused reasoning seemed to diminish.

can easily imagine a child who did not have any satisfying exchanges withdrawing from people entirely. And a kid who withdrew at age five might be very hard to coax out later.

Papers I wrote back then are flat and devoid of inflection or emotion. I didn’t write about my feelings because I didn’t understand them. Today, my greater insight into my emotional life has allowed me to express it, both verbally and on paper. But there was a trade-off for that increased emotional intelligence. I look at circuits I designed twenty years ago and it’s as if someone else did them.

When I look at those old drawings, I am reminded of a book I read as a teenager, Flowers for Algernon.